Joe Sexton, five-time Pulitzer Prize-winning senior editor at The New York Times, knows a killer story when he hears it. Sometimes it just takes a few thousand emails for him to listen.

In 2017, Sexton began to get bombarded by messages from an Alma, Kansas, woman named Eileen Umbehr, who, for some reason, became obsessed with proving a local stranger named Dana Chandler innocent in the 2002 double murder of Chandler's ex-husband, Mike Sisco, and his new partner, Karen Harkness. Despite a complete lack of physical evidence, the courts saw otherwise - twice (out of three trials; one was a hung jury).

At first (and second, and third and more attempts), Sexton blew Umbehr off. But curiosity - and possibly a lack of email storage - ultimately got the best of him.

Sexton's midwest visits over the course of years would become the basis for numerous newspaper columns - and eventually, for Matthew Galkin's perfectly titled documentary A Killer Story.

In the HBO docuseries releasing on Thursday (at 9:00 p.m. on HBO and HBO Max), produced by Joshua Levine, Sexton comes off as anything but a stuffy reporter. If you know his work - or from the old neighborhood - that won't surprise you one bit.

 [Sexton's] voice was so fucking specific and singular,  Galkin (One Night in Idaho: The College Murders) tells The Hollywood Reporter.  He was like a stand-in for a private investigator from film noir - from crime novels of like the 1950s and 60s. 

Sexton says his loose, foul-mouthed form of storytelling stems from being raised as  a Brooklyn bullshit artist. 

 As a kid in 1960s Brooklyn, your entire culture was just telling the same fucking stories over and over again with a little bit of flourish, or a little embellishment here or there,  Sexton tells THR.

Even so, it was  a little bit of a challenge  for the self-described  newspaper man  to write for TV, he says. What Sexton wrote - and what he spoke into Galkin's camera lens - was some of the best documentary narration in recent memory.

 He didn't approach it in a way that was intellectual,  Levine (Maternal Instinct) says.  It was very, I don't

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